Malcolm Bradbury

SOURCE: "The Nonhomemade World: European and American Modernism," in American Quarterly, Vol. 39, Spring, 1987, pp. 27-36.

In the following essay, Bradbury focuses on the divergent origins and development of Modernism among American and European writers.

At the beginning of A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers (1975), Hugh Kenner performs an elegant act of metaphorical magic by yoking violently together two items in the history of modernity separately much celebrated, but not usually associated. One is the flight of the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk in 1903, the first serious proof of powered flight, and a clear triumph of American technological inventiveness. The other is a work of fiction started the next year in which the image of the artist as modern flyer has a striking place. That fiction, of course, is Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where Stephen Dedalus's flight into the unknown...